3 Questions To Help Your Business Accelerate In 2021
3 Questions To Help Your Business Accelerate In 2021
How to be proactive rather than reflective on your 2021 plan.
Casey Horner
The end of a year and the beginning of a new one triggers a mass reflection moment.
Not all reflection is productive though. If you spend a lot of time reflecting on the negatives, and very very long-term goals, your reflection will simply be a reflection (which is important too) without providing many breadcrumbs for immediate action.
When you focus your attention on an end-of-year reflection with a targeted goal of changing how 2021 will look like for you, your questions should become very specific with the intention of producing an action plan.
Here are 3 questions you should be asking in order to produce tangible movement on your business in 2021.
How many times did my actions give me happy butterflies?
When you reflect back on how courageous you were throughout the year — where would your tally be?
Did you bravely do things that scared you atleast once a quarter? Or did you stay low key?
I call doing scary things that expand your “happy butterflies”. Happy butterflies are those actions you take that make you nervous (because of its vulnerability), but you know that taking that action will help your business grow in some way.
If you’re committed to accelerating your growth in 2021, I challenge you to double your attempts at happy butterflies. If you’re feeling super brave, I challenge you to do it atleast once per quarter.
Some examples of happy butterfly actions include: going live on Facebook or Instagram to talk about your business or to give away valuable content; making more sales calls; asking for more (opportunities, money & otherwise).
If you don’t know what happy butterfly actions you should take in 2021, I strongly encourage doing a mastermind with some fellow entrepreneurs to help each other dig into the answers or work with a coach to help you discover them.
What’s one manageable culprit behind my biggest challenge right now?
I’m sure that there was a challenge this year that really followed you all of 2020. It gnawed at you monthly and although you made some discoveries and solved some components of this problem, you’re still in hot pursuit of solving this challenge for good.
You may be feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, and a little defeated that you haven’t resolved this challenge yet. If you’re still in pursuit of solving this challenge, what this tells me is that you’re solving a multi-year problem rather than a year-long one.
Instead of trying to tackle a multi-year problem with a quick-fix mindset, start looking at your challenge in layers. What is the one manageable culprit of your biggest challenge that you can put energy into resolving right now? What’s available to you right now as far as a fixable agenda?
If you have your mind set on fixing a multi-year problem as soon as possible, you’ll likely overwhelm yourself with the details and quit before making any meaningful movement.
To truly move on a multi-year problem, hone in on the solvable layer at the moment and go after that with vigor. Move on to the next and next layer after that and you’ll find yourself in a more manageable arena of solving your biggest challenge for 2021.
How did I react during times of conflict?
2020 was a special year for curveballs. Between a pandemic, social and economic turmoil, quarantine, and everything in between, business owners were not short on conflicts this year.
What’s important to reflect on from this year is how you reacted during each hit of conflict.
Did you immediately go into recovery and reaction mode? Did you pause to reflect on strategy before taking next steps? Did you take a pause from work to digest all that was happening?
Some of you may have taken a strong mama bear stance and went into protective mode to support your business. Some of you may have taken a pause from work because it didn’t feel aligned to work and ask for sales with everything happening in the world. There are no wrong answers here.
What’s important to reflect on from this experience is how you reacted during the conflict and what impact that reaction had on your business, if any.
Was your business set up to allow for a pause when you needed it?
Did you go into protective recovery and action mode because you didn’t have another choice to financially support a pause?
Did your pause hurt your business financially, or otherwise?
Reflect on how you did or did not feel supported by your business during a crisis and how you can set systems up to change your outcome in the future.
The consecutive wave of crises may have been unique this year, but what’s not unique is that conflict will again arise in your business in 2021 — it’s an inevitable reality business owners must learn to live through and with.
There will definitely be another crisis (globally and/or within the business) in the horizon — will you take this opportunity to set up a risk management plan to better manage it for your business for the next time?
Want to turn your startup chase into a victory lap? My Friday morning emails will help you get over your Crux.